Finally Found it 97

POV: Draven

The celebration was over.

What remained in its place was the particular tension of a packhouse that has been violated and knows it: every corridor under my order, warriors rotating through patrols in pairs, boots on stone at intervals precise enough to catch anyone who thought silence meant safety.

Someone had been inside my walls. Not on the perimeter, not at the borders. Inside. During a night when my pack was gathered in one hall, when the food and drink were passing freely between hands I trusted.

I stood over the war table with my fists pressed flat against the surface and read the reports without letting my face move.

Susan came in from the east corridor, a piece of parchment in her hand, smudged with the hurried notation of someone who had been writing while walking. She did not waste time on preface.

“We found traces of the poison near the kitchens,” she said, her voice stripped to its working register, clipped and direct. “No sign of who planted it. Whoever they were, they are ghosts.”

My hands curled into fists at my sides.

“Whoever it is, they are still here,” I said, keeping my voice low, letting the danger in it do the work volume would not. Someone skilled enough to move through a celebration undetected does not evacuate immediately. They stay. They watch for the reaction they caused.

Susan held my gaze for a moment, reading the instruction beneath the words, then turned and went back into the corridor without needing to be told what came next.

I trusted Susan with the search. What I could not delegate was the other thing pressing at the edge of my attention since the moment the report had reached me.

Isla.

I found her in a quieter corner of the packhouse, seated with Micah, both hands resting against her stomach in the protective posture that had become instinctive since the pregnancy was confirmed.

Her silver hair was dulled by worry in a way the candlelight could not entirely obscure.

She was holding herself very still, which was what she did when she was managing fear rather than feeling it.

Micah crouched in front of her, conducting the careful visual examination of a healer being thorough rather than concerned.

“The twins are okay?” Isla’s voice came out barely above a whisper.

“They are fine,” Micah said, pressing a steady hand over Isla’s. “But we cannot take any chances. Stay close, Isla.”

Isla nodded. Her eyes were moving through the room behind Micah’s shoulder, cataloguing exits and threats and the positions of the nearest warriors in the way a woman who has survived everything she has survived learns to read a room even when she is supposed to be resting.

She was afraid. She would not say it, had never once said it in any circumstance I had observed, and that was precisely why I could read it so clearly.

“Someone planned this,” she murmured, her hands pressing closer against her stomach. “And they did not just want to hurt me. They wanted to hurt our family.”

The word family. She had started using it without ceremony, without announcing it, the way a person uses a word they have accepted rather than one they are still negotiating with. I had noticed every time.

I crossed the hall.

My hand came down on her shoulder, not gently, but with the deliberate weight of a man placing himself between a threat and the person it is aimed at.

Isla looked up at me, and I held the full force of what I was feeling out of my face. The room was full of wolves already on the edge of panic, and I was not going to tip them further.

“We will find them,” I said, and I meant it the way I meant every statement I made without qualifiers: completely, without a contingency built in.

Isla’s eyes were steady on mine. Whatever she was managing internally, her face had found its working composure: that quality of hers that I had first read as stubbornness and gradually understood was more precise than stubbornness.

It was a refusal. A foundational, unarguable refusal to be destroyed by the pressure being applied to her.

“This was a warning,” she said, her silver eyes not moving from mine. “And whoever did this will not stop.”

She was right. Warnings of this kind are not isolated gestures. They are the first move in a sequence, designed to produce fear, to fracture the target’s sense of safety in their own ground, to make them reactive rather than deliberate.

She was looking at me with the specific expectation of a woman who has learned she can trust the man in front of her not to insult her intelligence with reassurance she has not earned.

“No,” I said. “They will not.”

I kept my hand on her shoulder. The patrol moved past in the corridor beyond the doorway, boots on stone, the packhouse breathing around us in its locked-down register.

Outside, I could hear Susan coordinating, her voice low and her instructions precise.

Warriors were already stationed at every perimeter point. The kitchens had been sealed. No one moved through this building tonight without being accounted for.

Good. Let whoever had done this feel the walls closing in.

I had built Crimson Fang to absorb grief, absorb loss, absorb the attrition of a pack that had survived more battles than most packs twice its size.

What I had not built it to absorb was this: someone reaching inside our walls and aiming at the people I would burn the world down to protect.

The calculation they had made about what I was willing to tolerate was going to prove incorrect.

Isla’s hand came up and covered mine where it rested on her shoulder. She did not look at me when she did it. She kept her eyes forward, her jaw level.

But her fingers pressed against the back of my hand with a grip that was not gentle, and I understood what it was: not reassurance offered to me, but a claim. A mutual, wordless acknowledgment that we were in this ground together.

I turned my hand over beneath hers and closed my fingers around it, and held.

The fire in the corridor sconce nearest to us shifted in a draft, and the shadows moved along the stone walls, and neither of us spoke again.

There was nothing left to say that our hands had not already covered.